Menu #14: Liquidity Is Earned, Not Engineered

Tokenisation
What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th June
Tokenised Assets
Brand spice
Chef’s Note

This is The Menu: the UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing.

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

The industry is starting to look less like a series of disconnected experiments and more like a system finding its shape.

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

The dinner club is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

A liquid asset is something you can buy or sell quickly, at a fair market price, without significantly moving the price.

Think major stocks, government bonds, or large crypto assets.

An illiquid asset is harder to sell quickly without taking a discount. There may be fewer buyers, less price transparency, or more legal and operational friction.

Think property, private company shares, private credit, rare collectibles, or niche investment products.

Simple version: liquidity is not just whether something can be sold; it is whether it can be sold easily, quickly, and at a sensible price.

Tokenisation is often sold with a seductive promise:

Take an illiquid asset, put it on-chain, and suddenly it becomes easier to trade.

Real estate. Private credit. Collectibles. Funds. Revenue rights. Commodities.

And yes, tokenisation can make assets more accessible, more divisible, and easier to transfer.

But here’s the point people keep missing:

Putting something on-chain does not automatically make people want to buy it.

That was the warning from Oya Celiktemur, EMEA Sales Director at Ondo Finance, during Paris Blockchain Week 2026. Her view was simple: there is still a widespread misunderstanding that tokenising an illiquid asset somehow makes it liquid.

It doesn’t.

Tokenisation can improve the rails. It can reduce friction. It can make ownership easier to record and transfer. But liquidity still depends on something much older:

Buyers, sellers, trust, pricing, and depth.

Tokenisation is most powerful in markets where demand already exists, but the infrastructure is slow.

Think government bonds, money market funds, ETFs, large institutional pools, and other financial instruments where capital is already active.

In those cases, tokenisation doesn’t need to create the market.

The market is already there.

What it can do is make that market work better:

That is a real upgrade.

The value is not “new liquidity from nowhere”.
It is making existing liquidity easier to use.

The problem starts when the same logic is applied to assets that were never naturally liquid in the first place.

A niche property interest.
A private credit exposure.
A rare collectible.
A bespoke revenue share.

Tokenising these may make them easier to represent and transfer, but it does not solve the core market problem: there may not be enough people willing to trade them regularly.

A token can be tradable 24/7 and still have no meaningful market.

That is the difference between availability and liquidity.

One means the market is open.
The other means there is enough depth for real trading.

It is an infrastructure upgrade.

That may sound less exciting, but it is actually the more serious story.

The next phase of tokenised markets will not be about putting everything on-chain and hoping liquidity appears. It will be about identifying where tokenisation genuinely matches market reality.

Some assets will benefit enormously.

Others will remain illiquid, just with better digital wrappers.

The winning tokenisation projects won’t be the ones claiming every asset can become liquid.

They will be the ones that understand where demand already exists, where infrastructure is the bottleneck, and where programmable rails can make markets faster, cheaper, and easier to operate.

Tokenisation does not create demand.

It makes demand easier to organise.

Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is built around one uncomfortable idea:

The higher you go, the less your problems are technical, and the more they become behavioural.

That is why it works for founders.

The traits that get you early traction, moving fast, solving problems, adding value, and pushing hard, can eventually become the behaviours that hold you back.

Goldsmith’s point is simple:

Successful people often know what to do.
The harder part is knowing what to stop.

Stop interrupting.
Stop adding too much value.
Stop needing to prove how smart you are.
Stop claiming too much credit.
Stop making excuses.

The “adding too much value” idea is especially strong. Someone brings you an idea: you improve it by 10% but reduce their ownership by 50%.

The idea may be better, but the person is less bought in.

For founders, this matters because culture is built in small moments:

Do you listen?
Do you give credit?
Do you apologise properly?
Do people feel heard?

The advice is basic: say thank you, listen properly, apologise without defending yourself, give away credit, and follow up.

Basic does not mean easy.

W3DC takeaway:
The habits that got you early traction may not be the habits that help you scale.

At some point, leadership becomes less about being the smartest person in the room and more about creating a room where other people can do their best work.

Founder question:
What do you need to stop doing to become easier to follow?

A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed.

The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.

They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.

Seats are limited by design.

Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

This is not a consumer story. It is a balance sheet story.

What matters is not what gets tokenised first, but what institutions are willing to hold, fund, and reuse.

The unlock is simple: capital that moves faster, sits idle less, and gets deployed more efficiently.

Tokenised MMFs are emerging as the most credible bridge between traditional yield products and on-chain infrastructure.

They combine familiar exposure with new functionality: near 24/7 settlement, programmability, and potential use as collateral across venues. The ECB has already highlighted both sides of this equation, improved operational efficiency alongside familiar liquidity and redemption risks.

Why it matters: institutions get something cash-like, yield-bearing, and operationally flexible enough to plug into both TradFi and on-chain systems.

Stablecoins may dominate the narrative, but tokenised deposits are where banks are focusing.

They preserve the core banking relationship while introducing programmability. A Bank of England policymaker recently suggested they could overtake stablecoins within five years, precisely because they remain inside the regulated deposit system.

Why it matters: banks want the benefits of programmable money without disintermediating themselves.

Private credit is compelling, but structurally harder.

Tokenisation improves distribution, transparency, and servicing, ownership records become cleaner, reporting becomes real-time, and access broadens. But liquidity does not magically appear; the underlying assets remain illiquid.

Why it matters: expect tokenisation to scale first as issuance and infrastructure, not as a liquid secondary market.

Property remains the most intuitive use case, and the slowest.

Too many dependencies sit off-chain: legal title, jurisdictional rules, financing structures, valuation, and dispute resolution. These are not easily abstracted into tokens.

Why it matters: the near-term impact is at the fund and SPV layer, not direct, liquid ownership of real estate.

The takeaway is simple: tokenisation will scale where collateral already works.

Not where it looks good in a pitch deck, but where institutions can actually use it to move capital, manage liquidity, and optimise their balance sheets.

RWA tokenisation is often sold as a liquidity story.

This Brickken report suggests something more interesting: issuers aren’t mainly tokenising assets because they want instant secondary trading. They’re doing it because they want better capital formation.

The standout stat: 53.8% of respondents said capital formation and fundraising efficiency was their primary reason for tokenising, while only 15.4% cited liquidity as the main driver.

That matters because it changes the narrative.

Tokenisation is not just about making assets tradable. It is increasingly about helping issuers raise capital, reach new investor groups, manage ownership more efficiently, and modernise the back office around asset issuance.

The report also challenges another common assumption: that RWA tokenisation is mostly about real estate.

It isn’t.

Respondents came from tokenisation platforms, entertainment and film, private credit, SME lending, renewable energy, banking, carbon markets, aerospace, hospitality, and more. Real estate is still part of the story, but it is no longer the whole story.

A few numbers worth knowing:

That last number is important. Even with regulatory friction, onboarding issues, internal approvals, and market education challenges, most issuers still seem positive on the model.

The real takeaway is that tokenisation is becoming less of a crypto experiment and more of an issuance infrastructure question.

The winners may not be the projects shouting loudest about liquidity. They may be the platforms that make tokenisation boring enough to work: legal structure, compliance, investor onboarding, reporting, custody, distributions, and secondary access when it actually matters.

RWA tokenisation is moving from
“can we put this asset on-chain?”
to “can we use this infrastructure to raise capital, manage investors, and reduce operational friction?”

That is a much more serious story.

With spot HYPE ETFs now trading, Goldman Sachs appearing as a shareholder in Hyperliquid Strategies, and wallets linked to a16z reportedly accumulating and staking HYPE, institutional attention is clearly building.

But the more interesting story is still the mechanism underneath.

Hyperliquid routes almost all exchange trading fees into HYPE buybacks. So as long as the platform keeps attracting trading volume, the protocol keeps creating a structural buyer for its own token.

That is the bull case in one sentence:

real trading fees → buybacks → tighter supply → stronger token price.

But there are two big caveats.

First, a large amount of HYPE supply is still not circulating, meaning unlocks could create dilution pressure over time.

Second, regulation is now part of the story. CME and ICE have pushed US regulators to scrutinise Hyperliquid over market integrity, manipulation, and sanctions concerns.

So HYPE has become one of the most interesting tokens in the market because it combines three forces at once:

institutional access, real protocol revenue, and regulatory pressure.

W3DC takeaway: Hyperliquid is no longer just hype. It is becoming a test case for whether a revenue-generating DeFi venue can scale into institutional markets without being reshaped by them.

Until next time